Conventionally, in an office workflow such as of an assessment of a loan, an assessment of a new insurance contract, or an assessment of an insurance payment, cost reduction has been attempted through optimum job assignment such that “assigning a difficult job to a high-skill/high-cost person and assigning an easy job to a low-skill/low-cost person.” When such optimization is already implemented, further cost reduction requires improvement of each worker's skill.
For this purpose, incentives for encouraging workers to improve their skill should be designed appropriately so that fast workers are rewarded. To design incentives, the degree of contribution of each worker needs to be visualized as an index. However, if the number of jobs processed in a certain period is simply taken as an index, there may be a case where a large number of processed jobs actually results from choosing only easy jobs. If the average processing time per job is taken as an index, there may be a case where a 10-minute job is intentionally processed in 30 minutes. For this reason, the visualization is not easy.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-295579 aims to automatically evaluate a worker in a service providing system. An evaluation apparatus disclosed therein is applied to a service providing system in which common departments for processing tasks using a workflow are centralized and a worker processes submitted tasks. The evaluation apparatus acquires, for each task processed by a worker, the importance of the content of the task and the importance of settlement in the workflow. Based on the acquired importance of the content of the task and importance of settlement, an evaluation score for the worker who processed the task is calculated. Based on the evaluation score, the amount of compensation etc. for the worker is evaluated and the worker's skill level is determined. Unfortunately, the disclosed evaluation apparatus cannot appropriately address the aforementioned problem of slack off.
An incentive index toward “forcing workers to work hard” has been proposed based on an idea of Mechanism Design in game theory. See, for example, Nisan, Noam and Amir Ronen, “Algorithmic mechanism design,” Games and Economic Behavior (35): pp. 166-196, 2001, and Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos, and Vijay V. Vazirani, “Algorithmic Game Theory,” Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Many of such known incentive calculating methods are effective only for a particular scheduling algorithm (algorithm for assigning jobs to workers). As a result, the necessity of modifying the scheduling algorithm can be a barrier to introducing such an incentive index into an existing workflow system.